Saturday, August 24, 2013

Yosemite

It's been some time since I posted..... we did a mini vacation last week. We went to Yosemite. It is a gorgeous place. We were there for about 4 days and drove to the bay area and met up with some cousins and relatives.
It was a long drive to Yosemite with little kids and in-laws but we made it. Chandu drove all the way with just one major stop for lunch. We stayed in a cabin which was about an hour away from the Yosemite Lodge from where all the tours started. We didn't do any major hikes or adventurous stuff because of the diverse ages of the family. The tours were the safe way to go. We did the Valley floor tour the first day and the Mariposa grove tour the next day. The views were breathtaking. The Giant Sequoias in the Mariposa grove are 3000 years old and are about 300 feet tall. It was fascinating to get to know the history behind how Yosemite became a National park and the facts about the Giant Sequoias.
It would get challenging with Surya sometimes as he would want to run all around the place and when we went on the tour in the Marioposa grove, our family got split up and Surya and I ended up sitting with this lady who was extremely annoyed that Surya was talking continously through the audio tour. A couple of times she frowned at him and he started screaming even louder that she was scaring him :) . But on the whole I am proud that we did a trip like this with a three year old. On the third day we did a little hike to Bridal Veil fall and did a picnic lunch by the Merced river. Later in the afternoon we dropped everyone home and Chandu and I came back for hike in Tuolumne Grove to the giant sequoias. It was a simple hike and just took an hour and a half but was beautiful and enjoyable. In the evenings we would just hang out in the cabin and watch movies. It was pretty interesting not to have internet connectivity or cell phone reception for almost a week. You realize how much of an extension of your daily lives these things have become when you don't have access to them.
So after that long story, here is my layout for Hello Story class week 7 ( I missed making a layout for week 6 but hope to catch up soon). The topic for this week is Pie Charts. I love this topic and I am blown away with all the beautiful layouts that Ali Edwards created this week for inspiration. I lifted one of her layouts for this layout of mine. I thought the best subject would be Yosemite as we just did our trip. Here is my layout:




Ali provided us the masks for creating the pie chart. So I used photoshop elements to mask my photos into the pie chart. She also provided us an out line which was a .png file. I then imported this into Silhouette studio and converted it into a cut file (.studio file) so that I could cut out the pie chart instead of hand cutting the circle out. I don't trust my fussy cutting much. In this blog post, Ali explains how to convert a .png file to cut file using silhouette studio. I also cut out the background using a paper from MME (find your wings and fly) with Silhouette and stuck it on a white Bazzil cardstock. I created the tags around the pie chart with Making Memories tag maker ( I really don't know why I accumulate such stuff .... but it does make me happy when I put it to some use). I also used tags from Chic Tags to write all my journaling and embellished them with Studio Calico wood veneer. The deer and the MME background paper is from Salinger kit from Studio Calico.
I love the topic for this week and plan to make at least one more layout. Circles are real pleasing to the eye.... don't you think.
~Neela

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